Treatments to Slow Aging and Stymie Chronic Disease in Older Adults on the Horizon

September 29th, 2014 – London, UK – The founder of the nonprofit Alliance for Aging Research Dan Perry predicts chronic health problems of older adults will be treated in the near future by medical treatments that slow aging itself, and offered remarks on this topic at the MipTec Conference on health care innovation, a major gathering of pharmaceutical executives in Basel, Switzerland, on September 24, organised by the Biogerontology Research Foundation.

“Modern societies have an urgent need to protect growing numbers of older people against disabilities due to increased lifespans,” Perry says. “A person’s age is the leading risk factor and driver of chronic diseases of aging, including cancer, diabetes, frailty and dementia. But the good news is that next-generation treatments and preventions for these chronic diseases will hit their targets by affecting the underlying biological processes of aging.”

Perry also notes what is needed now are innovative business models and flexible regulations that hasten the entry of technologies that will modify aging to our own benefit.

“Future increases in healthspan, our healthy years of life, also will challenge drug makers to reinvent their businesses to maintain and monitor healthy aging across populations rather than to treat patients for one disease at a time,” he adds.

Commenting on the announcement, Bhupinder Bhullar, Lab Director, Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, Novartis Pharma AG, Basel Switzerland, added: “at Practical Applications of Aging Research for Drug Discovery, world-leading scientists discussed the development of the next generation of geroprotective medicines. We are indebted to the partnership and support of the Alliance for Aging Research and the Biogerontology Research Foundation which helped bring the global thought leaders to Basel for this inaugural event.”

MipTec is the leading European Event for Drug Discovery that brings together scientists from all disciplines of drug discovery within pharmaceutical and biotech companies, academic labs and technology providers. For more information about this event, please visit: http://www.miptec.ch/#&panel1-2

Notes to Editors

About the Biogerontology Research Foundation

The Biogerontology Research Foundation (a registered charity in England and Wales; registration number 1124054) seeks to fill a gap within the research community, whereby the current scientific understanding of the ageing process is not yet being sufficiently exploited to produce effective medical interventions. The BGRF will fund research which, building on the body of knowledge about how ageing happens, will develop biotechnological interventions to remediate the molecular and cellular deficits which accumulate with age and which underlie the ill-health of old age.

Addressing ageing damage at this most fundamental level will provide an important opportunity to produce the effective, lasting treatments for the diseases and disabilities of ageing, which are required to improve quality of life in the elderly. The BGRF seeks to use the entire scope of modern biotechnology to attack the changes that take place in the course of ageing, and to address not just the symptoms of age-related diseases but also themechanisms of those diseases.

About the Alliance for Aging Research

The Alliance for Aging Research is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the pace of scientific discoveries and their application in order to vastly improve the universal human experience of aging and health. The Alliance was founded in 1986 in Washington, D.C., and has since become a valued advocacy organization and a respected influential voice with policymakers.